Summer Camp Guide

About 150 children attend Delbo Cartoon Camps that teach them how to draw cartoons, and most come from families that can afford to spend up to $175 per week.

Cartoon camp director Ed Frontera said only four or five children received scholarships to attend the camps, which are in Boca Raton, west of Boca Raton and west of Lake Worth. But he hopes to see more opportunities for low-income children to attend.

"We will absolutely work with any groups that wants to provide a scholarship to send a kid to camp, and we'll give them special discounts," Frontera said. "Unfortunately, there are not that many nonprofit or for-profit organizations footing the bills for kids to come to summer camp."

The Community Action Program is one of the largest providers of camp scholarships in Palm Beach County, sending kids to more than 100 local camps. A national nonprofit organization called Camp Kids Foundation has sent children to out-of-state, sleep-away camps. Several other organizations also provide scholarships. All the groups rely on public and private donations.

Through government funding and private donations, the Community Action Program currently has about $507,000, enough to send about 1,200 students to camp. But there likely will be another 800 qualified applications.

"People who contribute remember a camp experience, and they want to do it for someone else," said Maureen Perrault, director of the Community Action Program. "For a very small investment they get a huge return. It benefits the child, it benefits the family and it benefits the community."

While the deadline has passed for low-income families to apply for summer camp, Perrault said the agency is still accepting donations to pay for campers. Any donations the agency receives can help take kids off the waiting list, she said

In Palm Beach County, more than 24,000 school-age children live in poverty. Without summer camp, many of them will be unsupervised during the summer months, officials said.

National studies show that the less supervision children have, the more likely they are to have behavior problems, according to officials with the Children's Services Council, which provides $150,000 to the Community Action Program.

"If these camps did nothing but offer a safe, supervised program, that would be a benefit to the kids, but they go well beyond that," Perrault said. "Some programs offer (academic) tutorials. Many go on field trips. Kids learn social skills."

While the Community Action Program only sends kids to Palm Beach County camps, a three-year-old national nonprofit group called Camp Kids sends needy children to camps farther away. The group sends about 20 kids to sleep-away camp every year, and several have been from Palm Beach County, Camp Kids founder Scott Golden said.

All expenses are paid, including airfare, saving the parents between $2,500 and $6,000, Golden said. They usually go to camps in North Carolina, where they can participate in rock climbing, white-water rafting and other activities that aren't readily available in Florida.

"We believe kids should experience the adventure of leaving the state and being in an area they're not accustomed to," Golden said. "And if we get them too close, parents will be there in their business, constantly coming over, and the experience is a little tarnished."

Scott Travis can be reached at stravis@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6637.